February 21 – April 13, 2024
The Golden Square Mile
A project by Deanna Bowen
Organized by Michèle Thériault
This project was made possible by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Program in Support of Artistic Production
A discussion with the artist followed by a reception will take place on Wednesday, March 20, 2024.
Deanna Bowen’s projects are ontologically connected, site-specific and dependent on the regional histories of their host gallery. Developed specifically for the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, The Golden Square Mile follows the socio-economic connections within the Anglo-Montrealer community further revealed in The Black Canadians (after Cooke), the monumental work on the facade of the National Gallery of Canada until August 2024. This community reaped the benefits of Queen Victoria’s annexation and industrialization of Canada. They were bank board members, railway builders, politicians, scholars, and other wealthy citizens who circulated in a social network that defined and built the propogandist cultural narrative of Empire by creating the Royal Canadian Academy, the Royal Society of Canada, the National Gallery, the Art Association of Montreal, and the Redpath and McCord Museums, among others. Montreal’s Golden Square Mile was home to many of these wealthy, influential people and their legacy has left many traces.
Bowen proposes groups of photo constellations as well as videos that address the embedded history of slavery and minstrelsy, of the Canadian Pacific Railway, of Black railway porters, of the introduction of jazz, and of the architecture and familial histories of the Golden Square Mile. Together they tell a bigger story about the genocidal impacts of Anglophone White supremacy, colonial extraction, the railway, slavery, servitude, ridicule, and wealth.
The Golden Square Mile is an extension into a narrative specific to Montreal’s history of Bowen’s project at the National Gallery of Canada. The Black Canadians (after Cooke) is a series of photo collages that distills the conceptual, historical and cultural findings from three interlinked exhibitions: Black Drones in the Hive (2020), The God of Gods: Berlin, Berlin (2020) and The God of Gods: A Canadian Play (2019). As with all her work, these projects have a multi-lineage chronological framework that conforms to the genealogy of her maternal great-great grandmother Aurelia (Gregory) Mitchell (b. abt. 1840 – d.1924), her great grandmother Eugenia (Gregory) Bowen (b.1872 – d.1932, her grandmother Jean (Bowen) Risby (b.1919 – d.1993) and her mother Leora (Risby) Smalley (b. 1943 –). Beyond her family, this chronology also maps the over-culture/colonial legacy of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland’s abolition of slavery in 1833 through the Dominion of Canada’s evolution, capping in 1943, the year of her mother’s birth.
Events
Essay
List of artworks
Press Release
Ways of Thinking
Exhibition Floorplan
Deanna Bowen’s projects are ontologically connected, site-specific and dependent on the regional histories of their host gallery. Developed specifically for the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, The Golden Square Mile follows the socio-economic connections within the Anglo-Montrealer community further revealed in The Black Canadians (after Cooke), the monumental work on the facade of the National Gallery of Canada until August 2024. This community reaped the benefits of Queen Victoria’s annexation and industrialization of Canada. They were bank board members, railway builders, politicians, scholars, and other wealthy citizens who circulated in a social network that defined and built the propogandist cultural narrative of Empire by creating the Royal Canadian Academy, the Royal Society of Canada, the National Gallery, the Art Association of Montreal, and the Redpath and McCord Museums, among others. Montreal’s Golden Square Mile was home to many of these wealthy, influential people and their legacy has left many traces.
Bowen proposes groups of photo constellations as well as videos that address the embedded history of slavery and minstrelsy, of the Canadian Pacific Railway, of Black railway porters, of the introduction of jazz, and of the architecture and familial histories of the Golden Square Mile. Together they tell a bigger story about the genocidal impacts of Anglophone White supremacy, colonial extraction, the railway, slavery, servitude, ridicule, and wealth.
The Golden Square Mile is an extension into a narrative specific to Montreal’s history of Bowen’s project at the National Gallery of Canada. The Black Canadians (after Cooke) is a series of photo collages that distills the conceptual, historical and cultural findings from three interlinked exhibitions: Black Drones in the Hive (2020), The God of Gods: Berlin, Berlin (2020) and The God of Gods: A Canadian Play (2019). As with all her work, these projects have a multi-lineage chronological framework that conforms to the genealogy of her maternal great-great grandmother Aurelia (Gregory) Mitchell (b. abt. 1840 – d.1924), her great grandmother Eugenia (Gregory) Bowen (b.1872 – d.1932, her grandmother Jean (Bowen) Risby (b.1919 – d.1993) and her mother Leora (Risby) Smalley (b. 1943 –). Beyond her family, this chronology also maps the over-culture/colonial legacy of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland’s abolition of slavery in 1833 through the Dominion of Canada’s evolution, capping in 1943, the year of her mother’s birth.
Biography
Deanna Bowen was born in 1969, in Oakland, California and is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. She is a recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021), the Governor’s General Award (2020), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2016,) and the William H. Johnson Prize (2014). Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada (2019). Deanna lives and works in Montreal, where she is an Assistant Professor of Intersectional Feminist and Decolonial 2D-4D Image Making and Co-Director of the Post Image Cluster at Concordia University.